Starbucks almost had a different name, according to co-founder
The popular coffee chain was close to being named completely different.
“We were thinking of all kinds of names and came desperately close to calling it Cargo House, which would have been a terrible, terrible mistake,” co-founder Gordon Bowker told the Seattle Times.
It wasn’t until Terry Heckler, Bowker’s advertising agency partner, said that words starting with “st” are more powerful that Bowker set to work a brainstorming a list of words, according to the Independent. “Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo,” he recalled. “As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville’s first mate in Moby-Dick. But Moby-Dick didn’t have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense.”
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However, Bowker had a special place in his heart for the old mining town in Washington and Starbuck, the character from Herman Melvilles’ classic. “A lot of times you’ll see references to the coffee-loving first mate of the Pequod. And then somebody said to me, well no, it wasn’t that he loved coffee in the book, it was that he loved coffee in the movie,” Bowker said.
The company’s worlwide-known logo has its origins in the Greek myth of the Siren, that said sirens lured sailors to shipwrecks, one of them being located off the coast of Starbuck Island in the South Pacific. In 2011 – 60 years after the company was launched – the words “Starbucks Coffee” were completely removed from the cup, leaving the mermaid logo to speak for itself.
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